The birth of the uncool

He may not have had huge competition, but Irish director Damien O’Donnell (pictured right) can claim without any fear of contradiction to have directed a better movie by miles than any of his compatriots: 1999’s much-beloved East Is East, a surprise critical and commercial hit following the fortunes of an immigrant Asian family in the UK. It’s taken three years for O’Donnell to return to the fray with his new feature Heartlands: a thoroughly glamour-free and de-dramatised road movie of sorts which follows an uncharismatic and frankly dull poodle-permed loser on his lonely one-man trek to Blackpool, his wife having left him for the captain of his darts team.

O’Donnell is keen to reassure Moviehouse that he hasn’t been living in a cave since that first success.

“It (East is East) was a hugely successful feature. I don’t know, I’ve been living my life since. I’ve tried to make a couple of films since, with mixed success – there was a Beckett short film, I worked with Mike Figgis for six weeks, and I was developing a film I’d planned that I never actually got to direct in the end. In this job, you spend a lot of time not directing and still working. And then obviously you spend a lot of time not working at all, depending on the quality of the projects that are out there. East is East was such a success that people keep asking what you’re going to do next, and you think ‘fuck, what am I going to do next, how do you top that?

“The hard lesson I learnt is that you shouldn’t even try, ’cause the law of averages with film is that if your first film is a success, chances are the next isn’t going to be anything close, unless you’re Spielberg. I suppose I was a bit blinded by the light of that success, the answer was just to move on, and Heartlands was a conscious decision to do something on the same sort of scale, rather than trying to move up.”Though set primarily in the English midlands (Derbyshire and Staffordshire), Heartlands fits very snugly into an established tradition of heartwarming, unglamorous North-of-England cinema, climaxing as it does with a darts championship tournament in the majestic metropolis of Blackpool, referred to throughout as ‘the Las Vegas of the north’.

In contrast to the highly colourful East Is East, much of Heartlands seems as visually drab as colour cinema will permit, with a preponderance of sepia backdrops, nicotine yellows and filthy browns that resemble the inside of a smoker’s lungs.

“That was all intentional. The world this guy, our hero Colin, lives in is supposed to be a bit drab,” says Damien. “He thinks he enjoys it, but he’s really just stopped thinking about it. He’s become institutionalised in a way, he’s gotten used to his routine and he accepts it, and any change to his routine is almost too scary for him, even changes that might improve his life.”

Colin is far from your standard road-movie hero: in fact, he’s so inherently unremarkable that he’s unlike any lead character in any movie ever made:

“That was the point we were making: here’s a film about someone who would never be a hero, who’s always in the background, who would usually have a credit like ‘Third Member of Gang’ or ‘Guy Behind Shop Counter’. Only with this film, it’s as if you stay with the guy behind the counter rather than following the hero out the door. That was part of the whole challenge: ‘can we make an interesting and engaging film about a character who you’d just walk past on the street?’

“It’s a film about things that are uncool. Blackpool, for instance. Afro haircuts, cheese sandwiches, darts games, camping holidays, Blackpool, pints of bitter... We even had Morris dancers, but that scene was cut. We’d a scene of Morris dancers being baton-charged by the police. There’s a lot of English culture in there – not British culture, specifically English culture. I can see you’re stricken, I’ll try to include the Morris-dancing scene on the DVD.”

Those concerned by this point that Heartlands lacks much by way of cultural sophistication can reassure themselves that living darts legend Eric Bristow makes an appearance, the great athlete turning up for inspirational tips and revelations during an advice video on ‘Better Darts’ shot entirely for the film’s benefit. Even better still, the sport’s most erudite analyst, peerless crimson-conked Cockney pundit Bobby ‘The Dazzler’ George, also worked on the movie, giving the cast guidance with their arrow-slinging techniques.

“Yeah, we went out and made the Bristow movie ourselves. Bobby George came in as special coach to our darts team for a couple of sessions, and he’s quite a hilarious man, but apparently him and Eric don’t get on, and we couldn’t have the two of them in the same room. There’s a lot of bad blood there from years ago, whatever happened.”